I picked up an ASUS Z97 board that's advertised as being compatible with their Thunderbolt EX II add-in card. Since I actually need Thunderbolt, I also nabbed one of those after searching the world over.

The card arrived today and ASUS has completely botched this. The card comes with a 9 pin cable that's to be plugged into a Thunderbolt header socket on the motherboard. Naturally, the motherboard only has a 5 pin socket for this 9 pin cable. According to some information on PC Perspective's review comments for the Deluxe board, ASUS has produced an adapter cable to remedy this. The part number is 14003-00380000, however they have neglected to include it with the motherboards or the PCIe cards. It is included with the mega-super-Deluxe board that kits everything and the kitchen sink in one box, but nowhere else.

I reached out to ASUS' e-shop today and they confirmed that I cannot buy one. They sent me to tech support, who confirmed that they will not send me one but wanted to send me back to their e-shop. This was a priceless conversation, where the representative repeatedly made a fool fool of himself. After going over and over the issue, he suggested that I try to buy this from a retailer such as Newegg or Amazon. Of course neither will sell the part, nor should it be necessary to buy something that was supposed to be in the box to begin with.

If anyone has contacts at ASUS, I'm sure they'd like to fix this oversight since it seems others are unable to use their cards as well. Otherwise, to the other 2 people that need Thunderbolt, buyer beware.

I appreciate the assistance. It is indeed absurd, but it is in line with my recent PC building experiences. My first ASUS motherboard was DOA and had to be swapped out. I bought a pair of MSI Gaming 280's to tide me over till new GPUs, and one of them artifacts like crazy. Waiting for that RMA.

It seems that the Thunderbolt EX cards might have been recalled (speculation) to remedy this. It was tough to find and I got mine through a small US based e-retailer. In light of that, the absurd part is just the fact you can't call their tech support and get it taken care of. When I called, it felt like I was teaching a training class and failing hard.

Posting this with 1 bar of Verizon 3G in the middle of nowhere, so I'll be shocked if this works.

Apoptosis wrote:I've passed this URL along to ASUS and I'll see if I can help get you the right adapter.

Nate saves the day as usuall

I wonder what they have to say about this ridiculous and absurd situation? Hope you give us an update on this?

ASUS basically told me this:

"The new EX cards will ship with the 5-pin adapter also, which is why they are not available in the US right now." So, the cards aren't for sale in the United States. What is happening is people are buying them internationally or bringing them over to sell and there is no way to use them without the needed adapter.

I definitely bought mine from a US based retailer, though small. They seem to be concerned and they are talking to "their distributor", who is talking to ASUS.. That being said it hasn't resulted in any helpful action.

What I have on hand would definitely seem to be intended for North America. The back of the manual has a full page dedicated to USA FCC compliance, as well as Canadian Communications compliance. To me it just looks like an engineering "whoops", followed by a sub-100% recall.

It definitely isn't readily available via the large retailers though (Newegg, Amazon, etc). The retailer I used said he had a lot of orders, likely because he showed it as in-stock. Hopefully ASUS can remedy the issue with their tech support so the others that picked it up aren't left with a useless card.

I throw myself on the mercy of the Gods! I've called ASUS tech support and ASUS store 3 times and nobody knows what I'm talking about. My new ASRock X99 motherboard has a 5-pin TB header but my THUNDERBOLTEX II has a 9-pin to 9-pin cable. I look at the date of these other comments and can't believe it's sill an issue. Can someone PLEASE help me get a 9-pin to 5-pin adapter?